Keya Choudhury is a Berlin-based intercultural trainer: She helps individuals and organisations prepare to work in different cultural environments than their own. Taking some time off from her current assignment in Bangalore, Keya recently came to Delhi for a short holiday. Being highly energetic and proactive, sight-seeing and meeting friends proved not fulfilling enough, so she enrolled in a week-long intensive Hindi course with Language Must. In this refreshingly lively interview, Keya shares some of her experiences learning Hindi, living in India and navigating different cultures.

Anil Misra is a senior expert in the field of renewable energies, having worked both in India and abroad for the last 27 years. As a student he spent one year at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he later also taught. He currently works with GIZ as Senior Programme Advisor. As part of a Germany-based multinational organisation, German is part of his daily work. He has previously joined one of the German courses offered by his employer in collaboration with Language Must.

Anil Misra (second from left) having dinner in an Italian restaurant with family of an Indian friend during one of his Germany trips. (c) Anil Misra

Along with economic development and social evolution in both developed and developing countries, leisure activities have become more important and diverse than ever. Relaxing after long and strenuous working hours and the other obligations of daily life is now a necessity. The “need to escape” is enjoyed in different ways across cultures and is closely related to daily lifestyles, working life, and cultural patterns. As Chinese society has experienced great changes over the last few decades, leisure activities have also developed a lot. I have had the opportunity to observe these evolutions in China and explore Western and Chinese views on this issue. The following is an interview conducted with David Ritter, a 27 year old American male who has been living in China for two and a half years, and Yang Qi, a 25 year old Chinese male who studied in Australia for six years but has since returned to Chengdu. Below is a transcript of our discussions about Chinese leisure activities.

I recently read an article in the New York Times entitled “In India, Castes, Honor and Killings Intertwine”. Over the six years or so since I made my first journey to India, I have recounted to friends and acquaintances at home some of the anecdotes (I wince to use this word – as if abuse of women should ever be relegated to a mere anecdote) I have encountered in first, second, or third person regarding the ways in which women are abused, maimed, or sometimes killed, as in the case of the young girl in the aforementioned article. I always want to defend or make excuses for the country that I love. It’s true, there hasn’t been a case of sati [immolation of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre] in years (though I hasten to point out, there has been in my lifetime), but I recall reading of daily “kitchen fires” in the police blotter in the Bangalore newspaper years ago; and discovering that this was a twisted and polite allusion to an intentional act of violence often resulting in homicide, not an indication that the country needed to examine safety standards of stovetop ranges.

As a result of stronger ties between Germany and India, cultural relations between the two countries have found new impetus drawn from a longer tradition of German-Indo cultural exchange. Foreign cultural policy experiences multiple incentives and support on both sides, which makes it useful to establish sustainable structures of cultural dialogue. However, a number of factors could be listed to shed light on the still asymmetrical nature that marks cultural relations between India and Germany. Among them are: different conceptions of foreign cultural policy, different stages of the respective art industry and cultural infrastructure, a historically determined imbalance of financial and infrastructural resources and the sheer ignorance in the way both countries have perceived the other.

Christian-Matthias Schlaga, Charge d'Affaires, German Embassy in India, together with Dr. Eckart Würzner, Lord Mayor of the City of Heidelberg, at a workshop of the University of Heidelberg's South Asia Institute that was organised by Knowledge Must in New Delhi

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